| 208. Compound Pillar at Vellore. (From a Photograph.) | 209. Compound Pillar at Peroor. (From a Photograph.) |
temple architecture is included. There are rock-cut examples before the first date, and some structural buildings in Dharwar on a smaller scale, which are older, but it is safe to assert that nine-tenths, at least, or more, of those which are found south of the Tongabhadra, were erected between these dates.
Of course it is not meant to assert that, before the first of these dates, there were not structural temples in the south of India. So far from this being the case, it seems nearly certain that during the six or seven centuries that elapsed between the carving of the rocks at Mahavellipore and the erection of the Vellore pagoda, numerous buildings must have been erected in order that a style should be elaborated and so fixed that it should endure for five centuries afterwards, with so little change, and with only that degradation in detail, which is the fatal characteristic of art in India.
It seems impossible that the horsemen, the Yalis, and above all, the great cornice of double curvature, shown in the woodcut (No. [207]), could have been brought to these fixed forms without long experience, and the difficulty is to understand how they could ever have been elaborated in stone at all, as they are so unlike lithic forms found anywhere else; yet they are not wooden, nor is there any trace in them of any of their details being derived from wooden architecture, as is so evidently the case with the Buddhist architecture of the north. The one suggestion that occurs to me is that they are derived from terra-cotta forms. Frequently, at the present day, figures of men on horseback larger than life, or of giants on foot, are seen near the village temples made of pottery, their hollow forms of burnt clay, and so burnt as to form a perfect terra-cotta substance. Most of the figures also on the gopuras are not in plaster as is generally said, but are also formed of clay burnt. The art has certainly been long practised in the south, and if we adopt the theory that it was used for many ornamental purposes before wood or stone, it will account for much that is otherwise unintelligible in the arts of the south.
Vijayanagar.
The dates just quoted will no doubt sound strange and prosaic to those who are accustomed to listen to the childish exaggerations of the Brahmans in speaking of the age of their temples. There is, however, luckily a test besides the evidence above quoted, which, if it could be perfectly applied, would settle the question at once.
When in the beginning of the 14th century the Mahomedans from Delhi first made their power seriously felt in the south, they struck down the kingdom of the Hoisala Bellalas in 1310, and destroyed their capital of Hullabîd; and in 1322 Worangul, which had been previously attacked, was finally destroyed, and it is said they then carried their victorious arms as far as Ramnad. The Mahomedans did not, however, at that time make any permanent settlement in the south, and the consequence was, that as soon as the Hindus were able to recover from the panic, Bukka and Harihara, princes it is said of the deposed house of Worangul, gathered around them the remnants of the destroyed states, and founded a new state in the town of Vijayanagar on the Tongabhadra. An earlier city it is said had been founded there in 1118, by a Vijaya Rayal, but only as a dependency of the Mysore Raj, and there is consequently no reason for supposing that any of the buildings in the city belong to that period, nor indeed till the new dynasty founded by Bukka had consolidated its power, which was certainly not before the beginning of the 15th century.